This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in Images for East Bernard Express, December 1, 2022.
We put up our Christmas tree on Black Friday. Quick and easy because it’s an artificial tree. Until a few years ago, we always put up a “real” tree, bought at Walmart, or a tree farm, or even obtained from my uncle’s cedar brake in Dime Box. The difficulties of having a “real” tree, including the presence of a live snake in its branches, convinced us to switch to an artificial tree. We do miss the smell of fresh evergreen.
Like many German and Wendish Lutherans, my family held the Christmas tree in high regard. Martin Luther may not have been the first person ever to bring an evergreen into the house and decorate it, but he was the first person to put candles on it, real candles, suggesting the sky full of angels at Christ’s birth. He and his family would decorate the tree with wild roses (which bloomed in winter in Germany) as symbols of the blood of Christ.
Since German was spoken in the home, my family had the tradition of singing Tannenbaum (“O Christmas Tree”) in German:
O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum
wie treu sind deine Blätter.
In English, folks usually sing it like this:
O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree,
How lovely are thy branches.
The German version harks back to the fact the song was a very, very ancient German folk song, with numerous changes and additions to the words as it traveled through history.
The above 1824 German version by Ernst Anschutz reads, “how ‘treu’ (loyal) are your branches,” loyal in that it is green in winter as well as summer. English versions prefer to use words like “lovely.”
Joachim Zarnack wrote the first German version also in the 1800s from the many folk versions that had evolved. He was a pastor as well as collector of folk songs, so he made the song even more “Christian.” If you don’t know all the verses, you might think it was a pagan paean to evergreen trees.
Today, most folks would agree that a Christmas tree should be an “evergreen.” Always having had the very limited opportunities to select from a rather short list of evergreens, I was surprised to discover via internet that there are seven types of fir trees, three types of pine, three types of spruce, two types of cypress, and in Texas alone four types of cedar.
Of those 19, the only ones I ever bought, or chopped down myself, were Balsam Fir, Fraser Fir, Douglas Fir, Noble Fir, and Red Cedar. Since fresh Christmas trees are shipped to Texas from all over the United States, it is difficult to know which ones came from where.
There are as many traditions about Christmas trees as there are ethnic cultures; however, until folks had electricity, the tree had to be taken down a few days after it was put up. Lighted candles could set the dry cedar or fir on fire.
Living in town in the 1940’s, we had electricity, and thus electric Christmas lights. In what I was told was the Wendish tradition, we put the tree up on Christmas Eve, and took it down the day after the Wise Men came on Epiphany (12th Night). So, thirteen days after Christmas, the tree came down.
When I was 6 or 7, I remember decorating the tree in our church with real candles, and with huge numbers of assorted angels, and with a Bethlehem star on top, but no Christmas roses. In later years, the church tree was decorated with Chrismons, each one, lamb, dove, three circles, anchor, cross, etc., was a Christian symbol.
Using Christian symbols to decorate perhaps keeps us from getting too secular and commercial about Christmas. To keep folks on the right track, Ernst Anschutz tells us in the third stanza of O Christmas Tree the reason for the season:
Let us all remember
In our gift giving and our merriment
With our family and friends and loved ones
The real and true meaning of Christmas
The birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
-o-
Ray Spitzenberger is a retired Wharton County Junior College teacher, a retired Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.